This New Open-Source Arduino Kit Makes Robotics Truly DIY

If you're relatively tech savvy, you've probably heard of Arduino, an open source prototyping platform and software that makes it easier and more accessible to create and program electronics. It's the foundation of most DIY engineering projects today.

Now the company is taking that a step further—into robotics. Arduino launched its latest product, the Arduino Robot kit, at the Maker Faire festival last weekend in San Mateo, California. The DIY kit is designed to make building and programming robots easier, and educational—you learn as you go.

"Mostly we wanted to build an educational robot—something that could be a platform to teach about robotics, mechanics, software, physics," Arduino founder Massimo Banzi told Engadget. "It's a very nice way to get students to understand technology."

I'll spare you the hyper-techy explanation of how it works, but the Arduino website has the details. According to the site:

As always with Arduino, every element of the platform—hardware, software and documentation—is freely available and open-source. This means you can learn exactly how it's made and use its design as the starting point for your own robots. The Arduino Robot is the result of the collective effort from an international team looking at how science can be made fun to learn.

The robots were demonstrated at Maker Faire and an early batch were available for sale. The Arduino Robot will be available everywhere at the end of June.